Why do affiliate links break, and how do you check them?

Part of: For creators

Affiliate links break for four measurable reasons: the item was one of one and sold, the retailer retired the URL, the link still carries an unreplaced macro, or the image behind it is on a host that refuses outside requests.

In one live pull today, 59.9% of listings were one-of-one stock and 34 of 86 image hosts refused a server-side fetch.

Red 1990s graphic baby tee photographed on a hanger, a single secondhand listing — One garment, one listing, one link. When it sells, the URL does not say sold out; it stops existing. Six in ten listings in this pull are of this kind.

The four failure modes, measured

Failure mode	What we measured today	What it means for a post
One-of-one stock	4381 of 7310 listings (59.9%) are peer-to-peer	Every one of those links has a finite life measured in days or weeks. Round-ups built on them decay fastest.
Image hosts that refuse you	34 of 86 distinct image hosts refused a browser-headed server fetch	Your images render for some visitors and not for your own monitoring, and a CDN policy change kills them all at once.
Unreplaced URL macros	4 links arrived containing raw curly-brace placeholders	Rare but fatal: the retailer sees a malformed URL. Strip braces before publishing, always.
Titles that are not product names	1239 raw rows (13.8%) have titles of two words or fewer, across 23 advertisers	Automated link text reads 'Cassette' or 'Platform Sandals'. The link works; nobody clicks it.

Why the one-of-one number is the important one

Six in ten of the listings we can see are single secondhand items. That is not a defect in the data, it is what the nostalgia market is — but it changes how content should be built. A round-up of twenty vintage links is a page that will be substantially wrong within a month, and readers who arrive from search in November do not know that.

The fix is structural, not diligent: build pages around categories and price levels that stay true, and treat individual listings as illustrations with dates on them. That is why every price on this site carries the date it was read.

Chucky The Complete Series limited edition steelbook opened to show four discs on moulded hubs — The opposite case: catalogue stock at a specialist retailer. The same URL is likely to resolve in six months, which is what makes it worth writing an evergreen page around.

A checking routine that takes ten minutes

Fetch every outbound link with a real browser user-agent and record the status. 97.1% of links here are HTTPS; the remainder will trip mixed-content warnings before they trip anything else.
Follow redirects to the end and check the final URL still contains the product, not a category page. Retailers routinely retire a URL by redirecting it to a shelf.
Fetch every image the same way. If a host refuses your server, decide deliberately whether to keep hotlinking or to host a copy you are licensed to host.
Grep your own output for curly braces and for the word undefined. Both are symptoms of a macro that never got replaced.
Check link text, not just link targets. 282 raw descriptions in this pull contain HTML markup and a handful of titles arrive with mangled characters; both end up in your post if nothing strips them.

What we do here

Every image on this site is re-fetched and re-measured at publish time, every link is stripped of macros before it is written, and every price carries its date. We have earned $0 in affiliate revenue to date and are approved by no network, so none of this is a sales pitch for a link-management tool. It is the routine that stopped us publishing dead images last week.

Honest empty: we cannot tell you how many of these links will still resolve in November, because that requires re-checking them in November. This page reports what one pull looked like on one day, with the method stated so you can run it yourself.

Last verified 1 September 2026: 7310 deduplicated live US listings across 109 retailer domains and 86 image hosts, every image host fetched once with browser headers during this run.

Some links here are affiliate links. LinkToLooks has earned $0 from them to date — no network has approved us yet — so nothing on this page is picked to hit a payout.

Broken affiliate links, asked plainly

Why do affiliate links stop working?

Four common reasons, in order of how often they bite: the item was one of one and sold; the retailer changed or retired the URL; the link still contains an unreplaced tracking macro; or the programme relationship ended and the redirect no longer resolves.

How often is affiliate inventory one of one?

In today's pull, 59.9% of 7310 live US listings come from peer-to-peer marketplaces where each item is a single unit. Those links do not go out of stock; the page disappears.

Why do product images stop loading on my site?

Hotlink protection, usually. We fetched one image from each of 86 distinct image hosts in this pull with full browser headers: 34 refused the request or failed to resolve at all. Those images may still load in a visitor's browser, but any server-side check of yours will call them dead.

What is a URL macro in an affiliate link?

A placeholder such as a device or source token that the network is supposed to substitute before the link is published. When it is not substituted, the raw braces travel into your post and some retailers reject the request outright.

Sources

CJ Affiliate product feeds, US advertisers, queried 1 September 2026 — the listing, link and title measurements above.
Direct HTTP fetches made during this run from a single US-facing server with browser headers — the image-host results above. A host refusing this request may still serve a visitor browser normally.